© Daniel Biskup

Stalin still sells. In Moscow-based independent pollster Levada Center’s latest representative survey on the ten most outstanding personalities “of all times and all nations,” published at the end of June, 38 percent of 1600 respondents in Russia included Stalin in their lists. Putin and Pushkin were each named by 34 percent, followed closely by Lenin. The first non-Russian name on the list was the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, mentioned by 9 percent of interviewees.

Although the Levada Center frequently publishes surveys on all kinds of sociological topics, the results of this particular poll gained broad media coverage – and not only in Russia, but abroad as well as it seems to provide further proof that Stalin has been rehabilitated in post-Soviet Russian society.

It is, indeed, obvious that the role of Stalin has at least been re-evaluated in Russia during the presidential terms of Vladimir Putin; look at the “Putin interviews” between the Russian president and American film director Oliver Stone which were aired in mid-June. In the course of these interviews, the Russian president admitted that Stalin was a difficult historical figure, but warned against the “excessive demonization” that he sees as one of the ways to “attack the Soviet Union and Russia.”

Characteristic Ambivalence

The underlying ambivalence of this statement has become characteristic of the politics surrounding the history of Stalin and the period of Stalinist dictatorship. For more than ten years, patriotism, heroism, and pride have been major parts of Russia’s official historical narrative, particularly in connection with the Soviet victory against fascism in World War II. The victorious narrative is an important common national denominator and a strong force of national unity. In other words, while Russian society is deeply divided in many respects, the outstanding contribution of the Red Army to the liberation of Europe from fascism is something most people in Russia can agree on. It is as part of this victorious “patriotic” narrative that Stalin’s image as political and military leader of the USSR has been increasingly positive among the population since the start of the millennium.

Stalin has also become more present in Russian public life. A number of monuments, museums, streets, and even metro stations have been dedicated to the dictator in different regions of the Russian Federation in recent years; the most recent case was a plaque at Moscow Juridical University to commemorate a speech given by Stalin in 1924.

Nevertheless, it would be far too easy to simply state that Stalin has been rehabilitated. Stalinism has left Russian society (and societies in the post-Soviet space) deeply traumatized. But while other parts of the former USSR developed academic, political, and social means of coming to terms with this particular inheritance, Russia still lacks juridical, social, and academic processes.

The legacy of Stalinism is deeply rooted in family memories and private archives, as almost every Russian family was affected by Stalinist terror in one way or the other. Due to the work of civil society organizations such as the Moscow-based International Memorial, a tremendous amount of sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) has been preserved, documented, and published. Every year on October 29, the national day to commemorate the victims of political repression, thousands of citizens cue in front of the Lubyanka, the former KGB headquarters and prison, now home of the FSB. They join MEMORIAL for the public reading of 30,000 names of Muscovites who became victims of Stalin’s “Great Purge” in 1937-38. This is just one example that shows how great the need within Russian society to commemorate the victims of Stalinism still is.

The Russian government is very much aware of this need, and tries to meet it with its own peculiar – and ambivalent – approach to Stalin. While Stalin on the one hand is celebrated as the victorious political and military leader of the country during World War II, the government also initiated and supports projects such as the GULAG Museum in Moscow and a monument to the victims of political repression set to be erected in the capital at the end of 2017. Memorial has been involved in a governmental commission to prepare the monument, even while the Russian Ministry of Justice in October 2016 included the organization in its list of so-called “foreign agents” under the new, repressive Russian NGO legislation. Ambivalence is the buzzword.

Dangers Remaining

What does all this mean for the debate about the potential “re-Stalinization” of Russia? Is it much ado about nothing? Well, not exactly, and not really; there are some dangers that remain.

First, the more the official historical narrative emphasizes the “positive” role of Stalin, the more likely it is that the memories of victimhood and suffering will be pushed back once more into the private sphere. This will deepen the gap between “official” and “private” memory, and thus the distrust in politicians. Potentially, a new era of “whisperers” – to borrow a term from British historian Orlando Figes’ major study on private life under Stalinism – could emerge.

Second, as long as the official historical narrative does not support any public discourse about either the perpetrators or supporters of Stalinism, no process of historical reconciliation can happen within Russian society. When Memorial published a list of 41,000 employees working for the KGB predecessor NKVD 1935-39 in December 2016, it produced a heated debate in politics and media, including the demand for legal consequences – to be leveled against Memorial. It shows how controversial the issue of perpetrators and bystanders still is almost 65 years after Stalin’s death and more than 25 years after the end of the Soviet Union.

Finally, the longer the ambivalent approach toward Stalin and Stalinism remains part of Russia’s politics of history, the more unlikely it is that Russian society will move on with important and necessary steps of internal modernization. It might seem easier to present Stalin as a hero and a leader of victorious battles against various “others” and “external enemies.” But in the long run, Russia will only be able to take its appropriate place in the 21^st century when it comes to terms with the dark and painful sides of its own history.

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© Parliament TV/Handout via REUTERS

For 25 years, euroskeptics in the United Kingdom have complained and warned of the dangers of the “undemocratic” European Union. The British people must claw back sovereignty from Brussels, they told voters ahead of last year’s referendum. It was time to take their country back.

But this week, these same MPs voted to strip parliamentarians at the Palace of Westminster of their power. They granted Prime Minister Theresa May absolute authority over Britain’s future relationship with the EU, rebuffing an attempt by the House of Lords to give the parliament an up or down vote over the final deal in two years’ time.

It was a remarkable surrender, particularly considering that other institutions of state have said doing so would be an unprecedented act, one that flies in the face of 300 years of British history. Historians have observed that there are practically no examples of the British parliament voluntarily abdicating so much power.

And it is also highly ironic that Monday’s vote means that the UK parliament will be the only one in the EU that does not have the right to be consulted over the final exit deal.

In two years’ time, as British MPs wait to see if the new relationship with the EU is acceptable to the other 27 national parliaments, they can only sit idly by and watch. They will have no say in the matter, even if they think it is a terrible deal for the UK.

A One-Party State

Earlier this year the Supreme Court rebuffed May’s attempt to circumvent MPs. The court ruled that she cannot start the process of leaving the EU until she is given permission to do so by an act of parliament.

While it was unlikely that MPs would choose to go against the 52-48 leave victory, it was expected that they would grant themselves the right to approve or reject the deal May worked out over the course of the 24-month period set by Article 50, the EU’s leaving mechanism. Indeed, the less-powerful, unelected upper house of the Parliament, the House of Lords, voted to do just that.

But the Lords were overruled by MPs in the House of Commons on Monday, who passed legislation giving May a blank check to do whatever she deems appropriate in crafting a deal that will shape British history for decades to come. In effect, they chose to ignore the court’s ruling, giving May the same supreme authority that she always insisted she had.

Why did MPs surrender the British parliament’s power? May had insisted that the specter of such a vote at the end of the process would weaken the UK’s negotiating hand. The 27 other EU member states would know that May would have to secure parliamentary approval, and they could exploit that to their own benefit. How they might do so was never fully explained by the prime minister.

MPs from her Conservative Party fell in line. Astonishingly, so did MPs from the opposition Labor Party, which is in a state of disarray under the chaotic and divisive leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. The lock-step acceptance of handing supreme power to a Conservative prime minister, who is still to win a general election prompted many commentators this week to proclaim that the UK is now a one-party state.

By stripping the final vote provision from the legislation, MPs have ignored decades of precedent. It would be the first time in modern British history that a free trade deal is passed without a meaningful vote by the British parliament; in fact, it would be unprecedented in Europe.

Democracy is Continental

The big hole in May’s argument for her supreme power over Brexit is that she is not the only head of government who will have had to sell the post-Brexit deal to a national parliament. The UK’s terms of leaving the EU, and any parallel or subsequent trade agreement, will be an international treaty between the EU and a third country, and such treaties need to be approved by every national parliament in the EU. The UK, no longer in the EU at that point, will be free of this requirement for democratic accountability by national MPs.

The ratification process by 27 national parliaments (and by the European Parliament) will present a significant obstacle for May. Last year saw CETA, the mammoth EU-Canada free trade pact, almost felled by the regional parliament of Wallonia (which, under Belgium’s quirky constitution, must also approve treaties before the national parliament can).

If there is a perception that a future EU-UK pact gives undo advantages to Britain at the expense of Europe, national MPs on the continent are likely to reject it. And then the UK will either have to stay in the EU, or suddenly trade with the EU on WTO terms – the same relationship enjoyed by Uruguay.

During negotiations, continental European leaders will be able to keep pointing to this need for ratification. “I’d love to accept that provision, Theresa, but it will never pass in the Bundestag.” What arrow does May have in her quiver to respond? “I would drop this demand, Angela, but my parliament will never accept a deal that doesn’t include it. Oh wait…”

So what happens if May ends up with a bad deal for Britain, a scenario that is quite likely? Will the British public be able to decide if they prefer this new arrangement over EU membership in another referendum? No: May has ruled this out. Will they be able to contact their local MP to tell him or her to vote against the new deal? No, because the parliament won’t be voting.

British subjects will have to sit back, powerless, while one woman takes a unilateral decision that will affect them, their children, and their grandchildren.

Is this the new era of democracy that the British were promised?

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© REUTERS/Inquam Photos/Liviu Florin Albei

Romanians are upset, to put it mildly. Over the last two weeks, hundreds of thousands of them have gathered in dozens of cities across the country to protest against government attempts to weaken anti-corruption laws. The demonstrators have chanted, danced, debated, waved signs, and sung the national anthem. And for more than 13 days in a row, they have occupied – and still continue to occupy – Victory Square in central Bucharest, opposite the seat of government.

They were spurred to action after the Social Democratic (PSD)-led government passed a controversial emergency decree to decriminalize official misconduct, where the financial damage was less than 200,000 Romanian Lei (approximately €44,000). The aim was clear: the law would legalize petty bribery.

It was a short-lived decree. The PSD couldn’t ignore the escalating number of protesters – who reached an estimated 200,000 in Bucharest on February 5 – and the international attention. The government bowed to the pressure, issuing a new decree that essentially revoked the original one. The official architect of the initial law, Minister of Justice Florin Iordache, then resigned.

But the public, riding the swell of discontent, wants more. Despite temperatures that dropped to minus seven degrees Celsius last Sunday, tens of thousands gathered once more in front of the government to chant “Thieves!” and “Resign!” In a stunning display of glittering lights beamed around the world, the protesters formed a giant Romanian flag by raising pieces of colored paper in blue, yellow, and red. They want nothing less than the entire government to stand down.

Romanians want to ensure what happened on January 31 can’t happen again. They don’t trust a government that passes laws in the dark of the night with no public debate, especially not when that legislation benefits many members of their own political party who have either been indicted or are on trial for corruption. The current government was elected in December 2016, and the governing party – the PSD – has historically been associated with corrupt practices.

The demonstrations are the largest since the fall of communism in 1989, but the wave of public dissent actually began back in 2012. Protest movements were first triggered by a health reform; public frustration then spilled over into demonstrations against the political elite. In 2013, protests erupted again when the government gave the green light to a gold mine in the Apuseni Mountains of Transylvania, where ancient Roman galleries still remain. These protests, which attracted over 30,000 on one night alone, helped shaped a newfound sense of cultural identity and empowered a civic consciousness. They were also effective: work never began on the mine.

Then there was the tragic nightclub fire in Colectiv in Bucharest that saw 64 people die after an indoor fireworks display ignited the ceiling and walls. Tens of thousands demonstrated, blaming graft for poor safety regulations. This public display of anger forced the then government led by Prime Minister Victor Ponta to resign, ushering in the technocratic leadership. Ponta was already on trial for fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion at that point. The surge of demonstrations cemented the belief among Romanians that their protests could indeed effect change.

Rooting out Corruption

Corruption is not a new phenomenon in Romania – it has always been a serious issue, but the fight against graft has intensified since the country joined the European Union in 2007. Institutions like the National Anti-Corruption Directorate (DNA) started to score major successes by putting several former ministers and top officials behind bars. Adrian Nastase, former prime minister of Romania, along with ministers and members of parliament, were put on trial.

The DNA, led by 43 year-old prosecutor Laura Codruta Kovesi, was launched back in 2002, but it only began to carry out investigations into high level corruption in earnest in 2006. These days, the agency enjoys high confidence among Romanians. Several surveys conducted in recent years put the DNA among the most trusted institutions in Romania, higher even than the Orthodox Church. The PSD has the largest number of indicted members; it’s not a surprise that the party claims the DNA’s investigations are politically motivated.

Despite the DNA’s recent progress, corruption is rooted deep in Romanian mentality. It starts in infant years and ends on the hospital bed; Romanians have to bribe everyone from teachers in school to employees in public institutions and doctors in order to survive. So when the New York Times asked Romanians to share their own experiences of corruption, the answers were quite predictable.

Graft is so chronic that the idea of mayors winning elections from behind bars has become commonplace. In Baia Mare, a city in northwestern Romania, 38-year-old Catalin Chereches won the local elections in 2016 with some 70 percent of the vote to secure his second mandate – even though he was arrested for taking a bribe in his first term.

On the streets of Baia Mare, most residents admitted that they were willing to overlook his legal issues. “Chereches did a lot for our town,” they said. “He repaired streets, built parks and playgrounds for children. So what if he stole a little?”

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© REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

There is much about American politics that is unusual to people in Europe, and this year’s bizarre presidential election is no exception. Europeans frequently criticize America’s two-party system, which gives a stranglehold on political office to only Democrats and Republicans.

There is only one country in Europe with a similar situation – Malta, where the intense political tribalism of its 450,000 citizens makes American political division look like child’s play. Every other European country has at least three major parties. Why should a nation as large and diverse as the United States have only two?

In reality, there are various strains of political thought in America. Both parties are made up of ideological coalitions, and tensions within them have been brought to the boiling point by the 2016 election.

Donald Trump’s win shocked Democrats and Republicans alike. Both party establishments are looking weaker than ever before. The Democrats are leaderless and adrift, completely shut out of power. The Republicans may now control every lever of government, but the party establishment appears to be primed for an inevitable conflict with their President Trump that could tear the party apart.

Not since the mid-19th century has America been so ripe for a fundamental shake-up of its political landscape.

Shotgun Wedding

The Republican leadership – embodied in House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – has embraced Trump since his shock win in the early hours of November 9. But they weren’t always singing this tune. Just a week earlier, it appeared that both men had abandoned Trump, with Ryan even refusing to talk about him publicly. Neither Trump nor his voters will forget that.

In the final weeks of the campaign, the Republican establishment was vilified by Trump at his rallies, and audiences booed when they heard the party mentioned. Meanwhile, the party leadership’s on-again, off-again support for the candidate and their fawning overtures after he won have disgusted moderate Republicans. In short, the brand is now toxic to both moderates and populists within the party.

So how long will the uneasy embrace between the more moderate congressional Republicans and the president last? It’s not just about optics. There are now fundamental and irreconcilable policy differences within the party. Republicans have traditionally been pro-free trade and hawkish US involvement in foreign interventions. Trump has said he wants to scrap global trade agreements and end America’s role as the world’s policeman. Despite winning the overwhelming support of evangelicals, Trump does not share their obsession with social issues like abortion or gay marriage. His vice president, Mike Pence, does.

If and when the Republican congressional leadership has to block President Trump on an issue, the traditional and populist wings of the party may be pitted against on another.

A logical outcome might be for two parties to emerge from the ashes of internal Republican conflict, with two new names: a center-right party in the mold of Angela Merkel’s CDU in Germany, and a far-right party in the mold of Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France.

The new center-right party would attract about half of sitting Republican lawmakers, but it would probably attract only about twenty percent of Republican voters. For 25 years now, the party has pursued a policy of bolstering its socially conservative and populist base while alienating its fiscally conservative wing.

There are few moderate voters left in the Republican Party at this point, as became evident in voting during the Republican primary. Over the past 15 years many of the former Republican moderates have become independents, and others have become Democratic voters.

Democrats in Disarray

The Democratic Party, pulled to the right by Bill Clinton’s New Democrats movement in the 1990s, has provided a natural home for many of these fiscal conservatives. But they are now in an uncomfortable union with the party’s progressives.

Bill Clinton remade the Democrats into a center-right party and he passed the mantle on to Barack Obama, who has also governed as a largely center to center-right president. Today’s Democratic politicians have more in common with British Conservatives than British Labour, for example. If Democrats joined the European Parliament, they might sit with the European People’s Party, or possibly the ALDE group of European Liberals. They certainly wouldn’t comfortably align with Europe’s center-left Socialists & Democrats group.

Bill Clinton’s Democratic makeover left a lot of people on the left of the party feeling unrepresented and taken for granted. This year, that wing flocked to Bernie Sanders, and they flocked with a vengeance. There couldn’t have been a more perfect foe against which to vent their rage – the wife of the man who transformed the Democrats into a centrist party. This explains the incredible level of vitriol against Hillary Clinton during the primary and beyond. It is the American left’s residual rage against a family that has robbed them of a political home.

A Democratic Tea Party?

Clinton’s loss has led to inevitable finger-pointing from Sanders supporters, who insist their candidate would have been able to defeat Trump. Both Clinton and Sanders supporters have been left angry and confused. The anti-Trump protests seen across the US in the days after the election united these two camps. But soon it will be time to decide how to mount an effective opposition to the president.

There are two options: to repeat the Democrats’ response to the 2000 defeat, or to mirror the Republican response to their defeat in 2008. In the former model, Democrats would work with the new president as much as possible and try to move to the right to win over the alienated white working class.

In the latter model, the party members would take to the streets in protest – not just for a few days but for months and years. They would pressure Democrats in Congress to try to block everything put forward by the President – a strategy that could be used to actual effect if Democrats can win control of the Congress in the 2018 midterm elections.

Disagreement on which strategy to pursue seems inevitable, and it is likely to split leftist and moderate Democrats. If that split coincides with a split within the GOP, we could be entering unchartered territory.

If moderate Republicans come into conflict with the new president and are plotting ways to form a viable third party, it would make sense to look to moderate Democrats who haven’t gone along with a Tea Party resistance strategy.

Any new moderate GOP party would need to build its voter base quickly and cannot rely on attracting many registered Republican voters. They would have to go first to former Republicans who left the party after it drifted to the far-right. Next they could turn to independents. And finally, they could turn to moderate Democrats.

The result would be a three-party system that is more recognizable to Europeans: A center-left “Socialist” party (the rump Democrats), a center-right “Christian Democratic” party (former Republicans and Democrats joined together) and a far-right “nationalist” party (Tea Partiers/Trumpeters).

American Exceptionalism

All of this assumes that the American political system behaves rationally. But the world’s oldest democracy behaves in no such way. A three-party system would require coalition building to attain a majority in the Senate and House, something we haven’t seen in America in 180 years.

Such coalitions would have to be worked out not only at the federal level, but also in all fifty state legislatures. It would be a very new phenomenon for the US and could also bring about great political uncertainty. Expect entrenched interests to resist such a development at all costs.

Political scientists also point out that the two-party system arose in the US because of its winner-take-all electoral system. They say this situation is unlikely to change unless the voting system is changed. But this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. A winner-take-all system hasn’t stopped the UK from developing a three-party system, for instance.

The forces of stasis in America’s archaic governing institutions are strong, but they are under immense strain. Remaking the American political spectrum along a more European model would be nothing less than an earthquake – one that would likely have ramifications for the rest of the world as well.

It’s now or never. If America’s strange two-party system doesn’t buckle under the unprecedented chaos of this year’s election, it likely never will. For Europeans who are hoping for an American political spectrum that’s easier to understand and navigate, now is the time to hope for a change – and maybe even offer some advice.

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© REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev

Mr. Yashin, President Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party swept September’s parliamentary elections. From the outside, it looks like Russia is united behind Putin. Is that true? You know, I’ve lived in Russia all my life, and I notice that people are often seduced by the Putin they see on TV, including you. The reality is, people live very difficult lives in Russia. We have all sorts of economic and social problems. Many Russians do support Putin, but not because he’s a really good president. They support him because they see no alternative. All the propaganda, pressure on the media, pressure on the opposition – Putin spent the last 16 years making sure there was no alternative. That’s one of the most significant achievements of his time in office.
At the end of these 16 years you can really see that Putin is a dictator. Alexander Lukashenko said a very funny thing: he said, “You know, now I’m not the last dictator of Europe.” True enough! And if you look closely at the last presidential and parliamentary elections, you notice that people didn’t turn out. It was the first time in modern Russian history where less than 50 percent of voters cast their ballots. That’s the real outcome. People didn’t vote. They just don’t believe in politics, don’t believe they can change anything.

You’ve just published a report documenting the staggering extent of corruption within United Russia. What kind of impact does that have? The view that the Putin regime is immensely corrupt has now been widely accepted in the West, but do ordinary Russians get this information too, and do they act on it? It’s just like anywhere else – Russians don’t like corruption, they don’t agree with it, and they don’t want to accept it. But people in Russia don’t believe they can do anything about it. For a long time, people here were told you can never change the Russian system, you never can change the Russian mentality, that corruption was always part of Russia and it always will be. My colleagues and I don’t agree; we want to fight corruption, we want to inspire people to stand up to it. That’s why I publish my reports, and that’s why Alexei Navalny publishes his investigations into corruption. We’re trying to show our people what’s actually happening in our country.
The Russian prime minister tells pensioners, “We’re really sorry, we don’t have any money for you. Try to hang in there, good luck to you.” But at the same time, we see villas and yachts, castles and expensive watches. We know they have the money. We know they steal it from budgets, from oil and gas – they spend it on themselves, not their people. And that’s our message to Russians.

How much impact did the Panama Papers have? They uncovered astonishing amounts of money stashed in offshore accounts, around $2 billion linked to Putin … Yes, it’s very big. We have information, we have lots of documents and facts, we have lots of arguments – but the problem is, we have no way of communicating with people. We can’t go on TV, we can’t take part in debates, and we can’t go to big radio stations. What we do have is the internet, social media, and we have a number of small regional media outlets like Echo Moskwy and Meduza in Latvia. That’s it, though. It’s nothing compared to Putin’s propaganda machine. It’s like David vs. Goliath. All we can do try to tell people what’s actually happening. I publish my reports, make copies, and go out to talk to people. I hand them copies of my reports and say, “Please read this, you should know about this. It’s interesting information.” I go to Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and I talk to anyone who’s willing to listen. It’s very old school but that’s all we can do. And I believe that step by step, person by person, we will create a critical mass.

Before the last presidential election, we saw a protest movement emerge almost out of nowhere in Moscow and other cities. But after the vote it all seemed to fall apart. Why? There are various reasons. The first is, people lost hope. They’d go to rallies because they really did believe that if they went to this rally and the next and the next, something had to give. But Putin’s regime is very strong and very aggressive, and it targeted the protestors. Many of them went to jail – there are more than a hundred political prisoners in Russia today. Belarus only has two or three political prisoners, while we have more than a hundred behind bars, Russians and Ukrainians. So people got scared, a lot of people lost hope. Some left the country to go to the United States or Europe.
And Crimea was a turning point because part of the protest movement actually started to support Putin after Crimea. In 2011 and 2012, they saw Putin as a thief, just a corrupt dictator. But after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 they changed their tune. They said, “He may be corrupt, that’s true. But he’s bringing back Russian land. He’ll go down in history for restoring Russian territory. So if he steals some money, it doesn’t matter – we have Crimea back.”

That was always the suspicion, that Crimea was annexed to regain popularity at home. That’s right, and it’s a big problem for us, because Putin’s propaganda team made Crimea the central campaign issue in elections. For example, when I debate with people from United Russia and bring up corruption with facts, they almost appear a bit bored, and then ask, “Okay, but what about Crimea. Do you consider it part of Russia or not?” That’s typical of the political debate today.

Some of the propaganda targets you personally – accuses you of being a western agent of some sort. How do you respond to that? People who buy into that don’t want to listen to real arguments. Normal people don’t believe it because the reasoning behind it is just plain stupid. For example, there was a report on the Russian channel NTV that portrayed me as a Swedish intelligence agent. They showed a set of “documents” with an agreement between the Swedish government and myself – that I would send information and they would pay me something like €5000 for every document. The “journalist” doing the report even admits that there are no signatures that actually verify the documents “but experts are certain they’re real.” And then they bring on an “expert” who says he has no doubts about the validity of the documents. Then, the other piece of proof they used was video of me entering the Swedish embassy with a woman. “Here we see Yashin going to the ambassador to receive his instructions.” But the interesting fact is that this woman was my mom. We were going to the embassy to get her a visa. She was joking with me the whole time, she said: “Ilya, you are the dumbest spy in the world – you’re the only spy who goes to get instructions with his mother.”

You’ve taken a close look at what’s happening in eastern Ukraine and completed the report Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered within earshot of the Kremlin’s walls, was unable to finish. How do you see the situation today? Is the Minsk agreement dead? The Minsk agreement isn’t working, that’s clear. But this has become something of a frozen conflict – it’s not peace, but it’s also not war. It’s a frozen conflict, and that’s fine for Putin. Because he can use that as a tool to put pressure on the Ukrainian government. And Kiev understands very well that Putin can wield that pressure anytime if he takes the gas…

… and sets it on fire? He could torch it and we’d have the next war – that’s the pressure. He says, “Okay guys, you can do whatever you want. But if you cross a line, I can create big problems for you.” And Germany and France don’t really want to find a solution. They have other problems – Syria, immigration, the economy. They don’t want to solve this problem. They wanted to freeze this conflict and they’ve succeeded in doing that. Actually, it’s a compromise for them, even for Poroshenko and Putin. It’s cynical, but it’s a compromise for all of them.

Some Western countries are discussing fresh sanctions on Russia for its actions in Syria. This is a key part of what happened in eastern Ukraine: Putin realized he can play the geopolitical game, and Western leaders accepted it. That’s the biggest issue. They stood aside and let Putin instrumentalize geopolitics to put them under pressure, and he did. That’s why he decided to get involved in Syria – there was no Western response. None. Not for aggression in Ukraine, not for Crimea, not even for shooting down passenger flight MH17. Nothing.

What would have been the proper response? A political response! We want to bring everyone who was responsible for the war in Ukraine to account, including generals, the minister of defense, secret service officials. We’re talking about ten thousand people who have died. Ten thousand.

The EU has reacted by imposing economic sanctions, though many in Germany and Europe want to see them lifted again. Sanctions never work in the shortterm, never. They work in the long run, and we’ll see the result of these policies in a few years. But if the sanctions are lifted now, they’ll amount to nothing; they shouldn’t have been imposed in the first place.
In my opinion, good sanctions are sanctions against specific people – not against the Russian economy or the Russian people in general, but against Putin’s officials. We should impose sanctions against members of governments, against army officers, against secret services officials, against propaganda agents. That’s more effective than economic sanctions.
Take my friend, Boris Nemtsov. He was instrumental in changing the Jackson-Vanik [trade] amendment in the US – it’s an American sanctions law dating back to Soviet times and a thorn in Russian-US relations; Putin of course wanted to get rid of it but there was opposition in the US. Nemtsov had an idea: he went to Congress, to the Senate and convinced them it was better to target bad individuals than the Russian economy or the Russian people in general. It worked, and they changed the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Magnitsky Act. It was Nemtsov’s idea and it was a good strategy.

You think Europe should follow suit? Yes, sure. Because when you slap sanctions on the economy, Putin can use that for his propaganda against the West and against the opposition. He uses it to mobilize people, to show that the West is against us. But placing sanctions on individuals makes it hard to mobilize people because the measures only target one person – an official who stole money in Russia and spent it elsewhere. It’s targeting the villa in Miami, the yacht in France – and that’s smart, very smart.

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© REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev

Moscow is looking better than it has in decades.

When I first visited the city 25 years ago, it was the decaying capital of world communism. A decade later, during an unprecedented oil boom, Moscow had become a jungle of runaway real estate developments and monster traffic jams. Today the city is undergoing yet another transformation.

Returning to see friends this summer, I barely recognized the place. In the city’s historic center, bicycle lanes and broad granite sidewalks now squeeze out cars. Parking rules are strictly enforced, and outdoor advertising has largely vanished.

The changes are not only cosmetic. Gourmet burger joints, kosher restaurants, and craft beer pubs vie for the foot traffic. As a friend and I sat on one of the ubiquitous summer verandas one evening, quaint trams trundled by.

Of course, Moscow’s incredible urban revival has its critics. Opposition politicians grumble that it’s a ploy to win over Moscow voters before parliamentary elections in September. Drivers complain that it’s even harder to get around. And small-time entrepreneurs are distraught that their street kiosks have been leveled in the name of beautification.

At the same time, it’s hard to find anybody who would deny that Moscow has become a more livable metropolis. Even as it continues to curtail Russians’ freedoms, the Kremlin is keeping open a safety valve for its most demanding and active citizens. President Vladimir Putin can’t forget the wave of anti-government protests that broke out five years ago, when tens of thousands of middle-class Muscovites took to the streets. The main job of Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin loyalist, is to keep them from doing it again.

“Cognitive dissonance” was how one Russian friend described Moscow’s facelift. Like Dorian Gray, the Russian capital is putting on an attractive public face while the political regime ossifies behind the Kremlin walls.

On the flight to Moscow, I was amazed to read a newspaper exposé detailing shady customs schemes on the Finnish-Russian border. After landing, I found out that investigators had just searched the home of Andrei Belyaninov, the chief of the Federal Customs Service, finding shoeboxes filled with cash and valuable paintings. Two days later, the Russian president sacked seven regional leaders.

“Servants, Not Friends”

As the economy limps along, the competition for scarce resources is increasing among Russia’s ruling class, Stanislav Belkovsky, an acquaintance and political analyst, told me over brunch. “Putin wants servants, not friends,” Belkovsky said. “The firings aren’t political but psychological. He’s getting tired of his friends.”

Does that make people at the top unhappy? “Yes,” Belkovsky replied. “But it’s unclear what that dissatisfaction will turn into.”

Palace intrigue is a topic that most Russians would rather avoid. Instead, creative minds in Moscow are turning to abandoned industrial spaces to open art galleries and bike shops. I met a former investment banker who now sells custom-tailored shirts in an old chocolate factory. As the plunging ruble renders trips to Western Europe and the United States unaffordable, Moscow’s young globetrotters are creating havens for themselves at home.

Journalists are finding it difficult to work in the current political climate. I know a dozen Russian colleagues who have moved away in the past five years, and during my visit, one old friend was packing up to emigrate to Canada with his family. Among other concerns, the space for investigative and critical reporting is getting narrower: One colleague told me that newsmakers are increasingly reluctant to give interviews, and that more decisions are being made behind closed doors.

Putin is still very interested in Ukraine, said a friend who works for one of the last independent broadcasters in Russia. “I’m afraid there is going to be war. It’s unfinished business that has to be finished,” he said. “He’ll definitely return to Ukraine militarily. He won’t leave it alone.”

That’s not to say that all my friends in Moscow were overcome by doom and gloom, even if nobody was overjoyed about the current state of affairs. One acquaintance, a rising star in a large state company, told me defiantly that he’s happy to hold Russian citizenship because it’s one of the hardest nationalities to come by, especially compared with US or German citizenship. At the same time, he said, he can easily get a visa for anywhere while living and working in his native country.

Another friend, who works for the Eurasian Economic Union, Putin’s rival to the EU, mocked Western fears of an aggressive Russia and blamed the United States for sowing strife. “With the exception of the Baltics, are the former Soviet republics really better off now than before independence?” she asked. “Wouldn’t it be better to be together again?”

I took her question to be rhetorical and moved on. It was a warm summer evening on a veranda, and the trams reminded me of Prague.

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The Islamic Ennahda party has 69 members in Tunisia’s 217 seat parliament, among them SAYIDA OUNISSI and NAFOUEL EJAMMALI. After spending decades underground, their party helped contribute to the democratic transition.

© REUTERS/Zoubeir Souissi

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© REUTERS/Eric Gaillard

Tonight, France and Romania will kick off the 2016 UEFA European Championship at Stade de France in Paris. A new emotional roller coaster will begin for millions of Europeans hoping to eat, drink, and breath soccer – or football, as non-Americans call it – for four weeks. Football grouches will have a hard time escaping discussions about the tournament’s title favorites and the likely line-up of the next match, as well as the condition of Cristiano Ronaldo’s six-pack and Zlatan Ibrahimović’s latest tweets.

Still, it is difficult to imagine that Europeans will be able to fully enjoy this distraction from the crisis mode that has overwhelmed the EU and its member states for the past six years. The next couple of weeks will be too tricky and challenging politically to allow enough breathing space for both policy makers and citizens to simply enjoy “the beautiful game.”

First, Britain’s decision on June 23 to leave or stay in the EU will significantly impact how the EU will look in the future – no matter the outcome of the referendum. Second, only three days later on June 26, Spain’s choice to either get behind the protest vote or reconnect with the parties that ruled the country since the demise of the fascist Franco dictatorship in 1975 could lead to even more discord between member states. Finally, the EU’s refugee crisis will not end unless member states agree to a lasting solution based on European solidarity – despite the disputable EU-Turkey agreement.

Since the first tournament in 1960, the European Championship has become a stock-taking exercise on the continent’s ever-changing (geo)political status and zeitgeist. The EURO 2016 will be no different, reflecting the dramatic changes Europe underwent since the last tournament four years ago in Poland and Ukraine. Back then, Spain’s road to their second consecutive championship led them twice to Donbass Stadium in Donetsk; less than two years later, Donetsk had turned into a theater of war with Ukrainian armed forces and pro-Russian separatists clashing for control of the town and region.

While both Ukraine and Russia will participate in this year’s tournament, Russia’s annexation of the Crimea seems irreversible, most of Eastern Ukraine is frozen in conflict, and the EU and Russia have sanctioned each other. Football is not spared from this upheaval: Ukraine initially did not select players currently signed by Russian clubs, leading to heated debates about alleged politically motivated nominations. Both teams might meet in round 16, which could provoke a politically explosive situation.

Traumatized Hosts

Security will be the most visible aspect for football fans heading to France. France is still traumatized by the terror attacks in November 2015, when suicide bombers targeted a friendly match between France and Germany at Stade de France. Authorities are worried about the European Championship being a potential target for terrorists. European football fans will feel slightly queasy while chanting their songs in the French streets and simultaneously being watched by security forces and guarded by armed soldiers. They will face tight security restrictions at fan festivals, in and outside of the stadiums, and in airports, train stations, and metro stops, testing their patience to the limit. But this is Europe in 2016: a continent in constant fear of the next terrorist attack.

Contemporary Europe’s most worrisome feature, which will be present at this year’s EURO, is the return of identity politics and the debate over a multicultural Europe stirred by right-winged parties across the continent. Football itself has always had a tremendous integrative power. When the glorious Équipe Tricolore, the French national team, won the World Cup at home in 1998, players like Zinedine Zidane, Patrick Vieira, Lilian Thuram, and Christian Karembeu embodied the ethnic diversity of France. Their achievement was praised as an example of the modern multicultural French ideal and the success of the “French model” of social integration.

However, this national celebration of diversity was short-lived. Four years after their victory, the far-right National Front presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen finished second in the national elections. (His daughter Marine Le Pen will try to better papa in 2017.) And last year’s terrorist attacks have once again sparked a dangerous integration debate in France, which risks making a simplistic connection between feelings of insecurity and issues of ethnicity, religion, and inequality.

In Germany, the anti-immigration party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has tried to exploit the discontent with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policies. One AfD leader criticized the diverse ethnic backgrounds of the German players and argued that the Mannschaft “is no longer German.” And “Germans,” AfD deputy chair Alexander Gauland claimed, would not like to have someone like star-player Jérôme Boateng – who was born in Berlin to a Ghanaian father and a German mother – as a neighbor. Other AfD members criticized German midfielder Mesut Özil, a third-generation Turkish-German, for posting a selfie on Facebook from his pilgrimage to Mecca, calling it an “anti-patriotic signal.”

These examples highlight how toxic and explosive the debate surrounding integration and migration has become in Europe, and how easily football – a mirror of society – can be hijacked by right-wing demagogues. But even in times of serious division, Europe has always managed to reconnect through football – perhaps most famously on Christmas in 1914 during World War I, when British and German soldiers climbed out of their trenches for a match in no-man’s land. A hundred years on, the continent’s favorite pastime still succeeds in bringing together people from all nationalities and backgrounds – some hope in troubled times.

NB. A longer version of this article first appeared on the Reconnecting Europe blog, published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation European Union.

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Anyone who was around for the Cold War and not high knows that it wasn’t that much fun. So why are films and television indulging a sudden nostalgia for the era?

© picture alliance/AP Images

Christ, I miss the Cold War”: This memorable exclamation from M in the 2006 James Bond film “Casino Royale” seems to have infected the brains of scriptwriters from Los Angeles to Berlin like a virus, with lasting and consequential reverberations. Perhaps not least because Judi Dench’s M, even in a power suit and pearls, managed to exude infinitely more erotic energy with one contemptuous snort than Daniel Craig’s 007 in tiny swimming trunks.

In any case, there has recently been a notable increase in films and television series about the era between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall: from “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (2011) to “The Americans” and (just last year) “Bridge of Spies,” “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” and finally “Deutschland 83,” a US production filmed entirely in German. Not to mention the extraordinary German series “Weissensee” (three seasons between 2010 and 2015). Coincidence? There is of course only one correct answer to this question: I think not! …

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – May/June 2016 issue.

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© REUTERS/Dominic Ebenbichler

With the exception of Kurt Waldheim’s in 1986 – which raised questions about the former UN Secretary General’s activities during World War II – presidential campaigns in Austria have never received much attention. In this country of nine million people, the presidency is an almost entirely ceremonial office. Yet the first round of presidential elections caused a political earthquake that is being felt far beyond Austria’s borders.

Indeed, in neighboring Germany, a country with a very similar political system, the establishment is catching a horrifying glimpse of its own fate. Here as in Austria, the post-World War II party system is facing fragmentation. While German Chancellor Angela Merkel still enjoys immense personal popularity, the writing is on the wall for the parties that make up her government.

So what happened in Austria? On April 24, for the first time since the end of World War II, neither the Social Democratic nor the Christian Democratic candidate got into the second round. These two parties, which used to collect about 80 percent of the vote in presidential elections, now only received 22 percent – combined.

The winner of the first round was Norbert Hofer (45), a rightwing populist who had campaigned on an anti-Islam platform. In the run-off, he will be facing Alexander van der Bellen (72) from the Greens, a retired economics professor. Neither the Christian Democratic nor the Social Democratic candidate even came in third. That place was taken by a former judge, a political newcomer who privately raised €900,000 for her campaign.

Austrian voters were clearly dissatisfied with the coalition government of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats and their squabbles. They are also worried about the country’s economic development and – most importantly – angry about the government’s refugee policy, which radically shifted within six months from opening the country’s doors to closing off its borders. This particularly benefited Hofer’s Freedom Party.

A Systemic Crisis

“Good God, it’s a fiasco,” said Günther Platter, head of the regional government in Tirol and a member of Austria’s People’s Party, the country’s Christian Democratic party. “We are in a systemic crisis,” added Christoph Neumayer, the head of the country’s powerful Industry Federation.

For more than 70 years, ÖVP and SPÖ have shared the spoils of power in Austria. Blacks or Reds, as they are known, have led every postwar government. Good jobs in the state sector, public broadcasting, the trade unions, and every state agency and publicly held company, were divided up between their followers.

Voters have had enough of this. Their dissatisfaction has shrunk both the Reds and the Blacks, forcing them together into ever more unpopular “grand coalitions”. Even together, both parties amounted to only about 50 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary election in 2013.

In Germany, the trend is pointing the same way. Decline first hit the Social Democrats (SPD). From more than 40 percent of the vote in 1998, they are down to around 22 percent in the polls now. Merkel’s conservative bloc has been more resilient, but it is also declining. After achieving 41.5 percent at the last Bundestag elections in 2013, it now stands at about 33 percent in the polls.

On the left, it was SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s policy of social and labor market reform that tore apart the Social Democrats and encouraged the rise of the populist Left Party. On the right, Chancellor Merkel is now facing a very similar development with the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). This rightwing populist party – very similar to Hofer’s Freedom Party – agreed on its first, stridently anti-Islamic party program at a party congress on May 1.

Conservatism Transformed

Merkel has led the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) for an incredible 16 years; during that time, she transformed Helmut Kohl’s staid, conservative party into a modern, centrist, urban movement. The CDU abolished conscription, modernized family policy, gave gays nearly equal rights, and decided to end nuclear power. Most recently, it was Merkel who welcomed the refugees to Germany and got the CDU to adopt the slogan “Islam is part of Germany.”

For the longest time, her enormous personal popularity concealed the fact that her policies actually opened up a vacuum to the right. But now, Merkel’s critics mutter about how she broke with the wisdom handed down by Franz-Josef Strauß, a wily, power-conscious conservative who had enormous influence over West Germany’s politics in the 1960s and 70s.

“There cannot be any democratically legitimated party to the right of the CSU (the CDU’s Bavarian sister party),” Strauß declared in 1986. In this spirit, both the CDU and the CSU for many years took great care to represent enough rightwing positions – that is, until Merkel began her radical overhaul of German conservatism.

From Three-and-a-Half to Six

In 1986, Germany was essentially still run by three parties – the conservative bloc, the Social Democrats and the small Liberal party. The Greens had only just appeared. Now, three decades later, add the Left Party and the Alternative für Deutschland, and you have an untidy, unstable six-party system which is beginning to make it very difficult to form governments.

The spate of regional elections in the spring ended up with a series of coalitions involving Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, and Greens, who are almost exclusively allied by the desire to keep the AfD out of power. While popular heads of regional government can do quite well under such circumstances, the minority partners in government generally suffer, shrinking the number of coalition options for the future even more.

It is a situation that many Germans are profoundly uneasy about. Collective memory here is still deeply scarred by the political instability of the Weimar Republic with its plethora of small parties. It is this experience that made West Germany’s founding fathers introduce a five-percent threshold for any party wanting to enter the Bundestag. This threshold still stands, but now seems powerless to stop the system’s fragmentation.

Add to that another effect of Germany’s electoral laws: small parties – and this is what all the German political groups are turning into – have few incentives to present parliamentary candidates with broad political appeal and charisma. They will rarely manage to get any of their own elected directly anyway.

So what matters most in elections are the lists that the party as a whole present. To get in at the top of the list, you need to be good at your party’s power games. But such a selection is bound to produce a very different set of politicians, one that is likely to produce even more disenchantment with the political class.

Of course, it is far from certain that the AfD will continue its rise. With the refugee issue receding and the party caught up in internal quarrels, it is dropping in the polls. Yet voters aren’t turning back into the loyal, steady supporters of just one party that they were in the early post-war decades. Germany’s politicians – including Angela Merkel – are well advised to pay close attention to the writing on the wall.

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